GNOME Backgrounds Revamp

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

There was a small discussion on #tango (until we were politely told to 
go else where ;-) ) the other day about what we should do with 
gnome-backgrounds.

It transpired that several people weren't happy with the quality of the 
current backgrounds in the package. I want to rectify that, and I want 
to make sure that it contains a set of backgrounds that the likes of 
jimmac, andreasn and lapo will actually use and love!

We will have to revamp the current collection by throwing out some of 
the existing backgrounds. This is because we cannot have too many 
backgrounds installed as it makes the background selector list too long.

Several people agree that andreasn's tiles [1] are very nice and 
suitable replacements for the current set. I suggest we don't include 
more than three or four however, for the reasons above.

There are currently two other "categories" of backgrounds, which are 
"GNOME Branded" and "Translucent". I think we could reduce the number of 
branded backgrounds and replace them with just one or two with new 
backgrounds of a consistent style. The translucent backgrounds we could 
also reduce to just two. I think Tentacles and Rectangles are the best, 
and they are also now SVG since andreasn converted them from the 
original pixmaps.

Since we have removed several backgrounds overall, I'd like to add some 
new nature and abstract backgrounds. One other aim I have is to make 
sure as many of the backgrounds as possible are in SVG format.

So by the end of this process we should have:

3 tiles (from andreas' collection)
2 branded (NEW)
2 translucent (existing)
3 nature/abstract (NEW)

10 total

So, I need volunteers to make the new branded and nature/abstract 
backgrounds. I would like to include a background that could be 
considered the "default" background for GNOME (much like various Windows 
editions have "default" backgrounds). This could be an extra background 
if required, bringing the total to 11. But we can't go over this limit 
due to the problems with the background selector list!

So, thoughts and contributions and volunteers please!

-Thomas


[1] http://ramnet.se/~nisse/diverse/temp/patterns/